“One day, you’ll put your money where your mouth is,” he said.
“How about you take this collar off me and we make that day right now?”
The Horseman studied my face, his light brown eyes fixed on mine. I saw the green in them, the gold in them, colors that went so beautifully together. I wanted to gouge them out with my fingernails. He didn’t deserve them. Eyes like those belonged on someone with a conscience, on someone with a soul.
I felt a click, and the collar fell limply around my neck. My heart started pounding, adrenaline coursing through me like fire. He tossed the collar aside, and it fell to the floor with a heavy thud. A moment later, the manacles that had been keeping my hands bound behind my back all night also undid themselves and fell to the floor.
I was free, and in the instant that followed I felt my very essence come crashing back into me. My power, my strength; the electric surge that was my Serakon blood emerging from dormancy. I felt stronger than I had in all the time I’d been here, and possibly even stronger than I had ever felt in my life before now.
And I had the Horseman, my target, all but pressed against me. I felt my nails elongate and sharpen to fine points, the skin around my fingers darkening. One quick thrust into his gut, and I would have him.
“Now what?” he asked.
He was baiting me now, but I was running too hot to think straight, and so I took it. I jabbed my claws into his abdomen, fury driving the strength in my arms, my many years of training guiding the tips of my nails through his shirt and directly toward his more vital organs—into the belly, up and under the ribs, toward the lungs.
That was the plan, anyway, but my claws never pierced his skin. Not because he’d strengthened his stomach with magic, but because instead of pushing my nails into his body, my hands had felt the warmth of his skin and been drawn to it as if it was magnetic.
I wrapped my hands around his lower abdomen and went searching for his spine, running my fingernails up his back and pulling him closer. The Horseman seized for the briefest of moments. He’d been expecting me to try and kill him, but I hadn’t.
He stared at me, his eyes focused, the gold in them glinting against the fiery, amber light of my own. Then he plunged his hands into my black hair and kissed me, his lips exploding against mine. My mouth instantly parted, my tongue venturing out to search for his. There was heat in that kiss; heat like I’d never felt before in my entire life.
The kind of heat that only comes from a place of rage.
I dug my nails into his back and broke the kiss with a violent shake of my head. Panting, I stared at him, my heart thundering now, my skin ablaze. “I hate you,” I hissed against his lips. “I hate everything you are, and everything you do.”
He wrapped a fist into my hair and pulled a little, forcing my head to tip upwards. “Good,” he sighed, before pressing his lips against my neck.
Fireworks erupted inside of me, turning my blood to lava. My senses didn’t know where to go, where to focus. The sensations were overwhelming, an overload of anger, and pleasure, and hate, and want. I pulled my hands away from his back and went searching for his belt buckle. When the Horseman’s hands took over, I spun around and worked at my own jeans, my head and chest pressed against the wall, my breathing coming in hard and ragged.
I let my jeans fall to the floor in a pool around my feet and quickly arched my back. When I felt him slide inside me, I let out an exultant moan against the wall and slammed my fists against it. I knew exactly what I was doing. I was in complete control. But I allowed myself, in that moment, to succumb. To relinquish just enough of myself that I could bathe in this moment of unbridled passion.
The Horseman wrapped his mighty hands around my waist and pressed his nose and lips against the back of my neck. Gently, at first, I moved with him until he found a fast rhythm that had my breath skipping. Deep in the throes of passion, he smashed his hand against the wall, and I bit hard into the meat of his thumb, giving him reason to growl into my ear.
His rhythm picked up a little more, causing beads of sweat to pop across my face. My breathing stopped entirely when, with the searching fingers of his other hand, he found my aching center. I didn’t last more than a few seconds, his fingers quickly bringing me to the cliff’s edge of a world-shattering orgasm.
Our climaxes were simultaneous, and as brutal and loud as they had been quick. The trembling didn’t stop, and probably wouldn’t for a while as aftershocks continued coursing through my body. When he was finished, he pulled away from me, and I quickly scooped my jeans up and put them on. By the time I turned around, the Horseman was already standing over the collar of magic suppression he’d taken off me only a few moments ago.
Feels like a lifetime ago, now.
He picked it up and looked at me. Without saying a word, I walked over to where he stood and allowed him to put it around my neck. I never broke his gaze, making sure he saw the fire of defiance blazing within my eyes even as the amber light in them started to wane.
“You’re going to the hole,” he said, in a low voice. “You can think about what happened tonight, and figure out how you’ll do better next time.”
“Give me a week, then,” I said, “There’s a lot to process, and the cellblocks are too noisy.”
There was a knock at the door to his quarters. “Enter,” the Horseman called out, and when the door opened, two prison guards stepped through. I hadn’t even heard him summon them. I turned around silently and walked over to the guards, who were waiting with new handcuffs to slap around my wrists.
“Se hoska resk,” the Horseman said, just as I was about to leave the room. I stopped, my skin tingling, jaw clenching—aftershocks still wracking me.
I turned my head to the side. “Why did you say that?” I asked.
“That’s what the fiend called you. What does it mean? Is that your real name?”
“Why do you care?”
“Consider it a curiosity.”
I paused, glancing at him from the side of my face. “It means the holy bitch,” I said, and before he could ask another question, I pushed out of the room and left.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Horseman
Sometimes I forgot what it was like to truly live, but she made me feel alive. She triggered within me all those emotions I wanted to suppress. My rage. My pain. Compassion. I had no use for any of those things. They dulled my senses, stunted my cunning, and crippled my ability to think clearly, and objectively.
But tonight, in a moment of… passion? Weakness? She had tipped my world on its head. I couldn’t tell up from down, left from right, or enemy from ally. She was the enemy, an Outsider, and yet in that moment I had wanted her more than anything I had ever wanted before.
More than my own power, more than the ability to intimidate lesser men. In that moment, she had been all I had ever wanted. The wholeness of my desires. The pulse of my primal heart had driven me to pull her close and claim her as my own.
The feel of her body pressed against mine left an impression that was difficult to shake. Her skin was light, and fair, and smooth beneath my hands. Quick hitching of her breath, her ragged whimpers, her moans, this was all music to my ears. But it was the way she had bitten hard into my thumb that had sent me over the edge of the cliff and into that place of unbridled passion.
It was raw, uncontrollable, and wild—and it had awoken something inside of me. Something buried deep, something hidden, something ancient. I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t speak those words aloud. I couldn’t even allow myself to entertain them in my mind for too long.
The overwhelming sensations filling that hole inside of me were wrong. They threatened the delicate balance that was my accursed state of existence, and they could not be allowed to continue swelling within me. But in that moment, I felt powerless to take action against them.
I was paralyzed. My hands were bound, like hers had been the moment before I allowed my passions to overcome my sense.
What hav
e I done?
What had happened between us was electric. Wrong, and born of hate, and rage, but electric nonetheless. I had felt it in the deepest reaches of myself, and yet… and yet… another thought crossed my mind. One I hadn’t considered until now.
Had I just abused the power of my own authority?
What if I had designed this fantasy in my mind, this notion that she was something she wasn’t—that she had wanted the same thing I had wanted in that moment. What if it wasn’t true? What if she had only succumbed in order to… survive me.
Those had been her words.
She had survived men like me.
Men worse than me.
This imbalance couldn’t be allowed to continue. I had to find a way to rectify it, to contain it. More importantly, I had to ensure she didn’t see me as the monster she thought I was. The very idea that I would care what another thought of me was laughable only a few weeks ago, but now, I couldn’t stand to think she might be suffering because of what had just passed between us.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Three days came and went in a blur. Three days spent sitting in a dark, dank hole with nothing but my thoughts, my emotions, and the memories that circled around me like carrion birds plucking at my mind.
The dead mage strung up by his insides.
The Crimson Hunters who were waiting to ambush us.
The Horseman’s electrifying touch.
Of all the things that had happened to me over the last week or so, that moment weighed the heaviest on my chest. I could’ve been done with this whole mission. I could’ve killed him in his room. I had the chance. For some reason, he’d dropped his guard. Maybe he knew I wouldn’t dare try to kill him, because if I’d tried and failed, he’d kill me.
Or maybe there was more to it than just that.
I never let my thoughts venture out beyond that point. That was my red door, my Rubicon. On the other side of that thought, that hard line, there weren’t dragons, but demons. Monsters with a singular desire to rip, and tear, and burn every shred of my defenses and expose my most vulnerable self.
I couldn’t allow that to happen. Not in here. Not in Harrowgate. Not while the Horseman still drew breath. I had spent the past three days in a dark pit of regret, and hate, and rage. Nurturing those feelings so they could harden and become a weapon; the instrument of the Horseman’s destruction.
I could’ve have spent the entire week in the hole, but Calder was the reason for my early release. I couldn’t believe it had been a week since my first meeting with him, since the moment I was activated and regained most of the memories I’d suppressed before coming here. The last time I’d seen him, we had both been happy—or as happy as you could be in here—about my mission.
But now, everything was different. I’d been sitting in his office for five full minutes, waiting in stark silence while he read and re-read a document on his desk. He alternated between bouncing his left knee and his right, and when he wasn’t bouncing his knees, he was taking drags of a cigarette.
“Could you put that out?” I asked.
Calder turned his dark eyes up at me, what was left of the cigarette hanging lazily in his hand. He put it out without breaking eye contact, then settled back into his chair. “So,” he said, his voice trailing off.
“So.”
“What did I tell you when we first talked?”
“You said a lot of things, but I think what you want me to say is… lay low. Don’t make any waves.”
“Right, and would you say you’ve successfully done that?”
“Considering I’ve spent a while in the hole… maybe?”
“You started a fight in the mess hall, you were sent to see the Horseman—twice—and on the second occasion you went on a little field trip with him. Care to explain exactly why all of this happened?”
“Well, I mean, compared to my trip into Devil Falls with the Horseman, the fight that I did not start in the mess hall seems pretty unimportant, right?”
“Don’t deflect. What’s going on, Six?”
“Doesn’t your report tell you everything you have to know?”
“My report only tells me as much as the Horseman cares to say, and what he’s said isn’t much. He’s not exactly one for filing paperwork.”
“Yeah, he doesn’t strike me as the type. He’s more of a break your neck with his mind type of man.”
Calder pinched the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes. “Gods dammit.” He looked across at me again. “Alright, welcome to your first official report. Fill me in on what’s happened since you entered the prison.”
“I’m assuming you want me to skip past the boring parts and keep things Horseman related?”
“Please, unless it’s relevant.”
“Okay. The biggest thing you need to know, and the Order needs to know, is that the Crimson Hunters have moved into Devil Falls.”
“Shit.”
“Shit is right. The Horseman brought me into his office one day to show me some pictures of graffiti on the walls in his neighborhood. I identified them right away as hunter tags. That was probably a mistake.”
“Mistake?”
“If I had pretended I had no idea what I was being shown, there’s a chance he would’ve sent me back to my cell and pushed me out of his mind without a second thought.”
“Why did you tell him what they were?”
“Because he made a compelling point.”
“Which was?”
“If the Crimson Hunters are in Devil Falls, it’s only a matter of time before they move in on Harrowgate. They already made an attempt on the Horseman’s life, which shows they’re bold and motivated. I value my skin too much to be a sitting duck in here when they break the walls down.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“It’s the only way of putting it. As much as I enjoy the idea that hunters are out there killing Coalition assholes, they’re also going to kill Outsiders and innocent Natives before they even get to Harrowgate. And when they make it in here, it’s going to be a bloodbath. Every single Outsider in here will die. The mages running this place are a joke compared to the hunters. What does Seline think about this?”
Calder took a deep breath. “Seline doesn’t know. She’s been busy concentrating on the escalating situation with the Naga.”
“Naga?”
He shook his head. “Nothing you need to worry about. You already have enough on your plate. Tell me about what happened the other night, when he took you out of the prison.”
I swallowed. Calder was a Psionic, which meant there was a high probability he’d know if I lied to him, or deliberately held something back. I couldn’t exactly tell I’m I’d allowed the Horseman to pin me up against a wall and ravage me.
Gods indeed.
“Someone had been killed that night,” I said. “A mage. He wanted to go and investigate, and he wanted me to go with him, but it was a trap.”
“Trap?”
“The Hunters were waiting for us. I think the Horseman was his real target.”
Calder’s eyes narrowed. “His?” he asked. “Who’s?”
“Sorzath… he’s someone I used to know. Back before Seline found me, when I lived as a prisoner of my own people, Sorzath was the son of a Serakon High Priest named Scythe. He was young, and stupid, as oppose to his father who was old and stupid. But unlike his father, Sorzath… took a special interest in me.”
“I don’t like where this is going.”
I shook my head. “Nothing ever happened, though not that he didn’t try. He would sneak into the hole I was being kept in and watch me most nights. Others, when he was feeling brave, he would inch closer while I slept—or pretended to, anyway. At first, he only wanted to see me, to look at me.”
“Why?” He put his hands up. “I’m sorry, I just… don’t know much about this part of your life.”
I sighed. “Se hoska resk. In my language, it means the holy bitch. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but even wi
thout my glamor, I don’t look like the rest of my people.”
“I had noticed that.”
“Well, they noticed too, and they both revered and hated me for it. They locked me up and bound me in shackles, but they wouldn’t kill me. Most thought I was a gift from God, others thought I was an abomination. The two factions reached a stalemate, so I didn’t die, but I also couldn’t be set free. Sometimes I’d get ridiculed, cursed out, or even beaten. Other times I would be asked to give out my blessings.”
“I can’t imagine what that’s like.”
I shrugged. “I learned to live with it. I also learned a lot about my people. My people are incredibly religious and superstitious… and just as curious as we are vicious. That’s where we get back to Sorzath.”
“He was curious of you.”
“Very much. At first, I didn’t mind him looking at me. It was a nice change of pace. But as the nights turned to weeks, and months, his confidence grew. He wanted to get closer, to touch… and more. The first time he touched me, I let him. It was innocent and curious, his hand on my foot. Every night he came back after that, he would start there. Touching my foot. Then one day his hand started to slide.”
Calder shook his head. “No…” he said, trailing off.
“I’d suspected he would try something like that, so I’d smashed one of the plates I’d been given days before and I’d kept one of the shards close to my feet. As soon as his hand started creeping a little too high, I slashed his face with the piece of broken plate and made a gash six inches across and a full inch deep.”
Calder flinched and sucked a breath in through his teeth.
“I saw him again the following night,” I continued, “He told me what he was going to do to me, and then told me how he was planning on killing me after he was done. I struggled and screamed, and I drove the tips of my claws into his abdomen when I got the chance. I thought I had killed him. I was told he had died that night. There was so much blood.”
Night Hunter (The Devil of Harrowgate Book 1) Page 10
